


Winter Honey

by stripeysheepsocks



Category: Chalice - Robin McKinley, The Broken Earth Series - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:09:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22668334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stripeysheepsocks/pseuds/stripeysheepsocks
Summary: Initial drabble. McKinley's "Chalice" has such a floaty sort of world-building but also earthquakes, it seems like it could fit tidily into the more robust world of Fifth Seasons and the Broken Earth.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	Winter Honey

The bees swarmed, and swarmed again over the course of that spring. 

The first days after the sulfurous stench of the Season finally cleared were attended by trees unfurling their diamond-tipped buds into the first tentative leaves of spring, and grass sprouting from its deep roots, pushing up through the layers upon layers of ash. The grass and the trees had the benefit of a deep hibernation state, with the mycorrhizal networks that had kept them fed through the season ebbing away to spores and empty tunnels. Those networks, which during the season had sent up great pallid canopies and absorbed the spilled nutrients of violent conflict, were not gone, but were less able to compete with the sudden influx of sunlight and return of more photon-oriented organisms. 

The humans emerged nearly as quickly, swarming from their walled communities almost as thick as the bees. The old Master of the local community had held together the walls during the worst of the quakes, and the Chalice and Seneschal had helped keep the people ordered and waylaid their fears during the long years of ashen darkness. 

Although the spring was welcome, transition was never easy. The old Master had spent his energies protecting the comm. Without the constant pressure of the Season upon him, he seemed to crumble, falling apart where he had been strong and contained. The Chalice attended him in his final days. It seemed that as the green grass grew and the trees stretched higher, he shrank and faded in equal measure. His son, the elder one, gained more intensity in those days. The young man seemed nervy and excited, and when the old Master finally passed and was laid to rest amongst the stones, the Chalice had used a rather more calming mixture than traditional for the final rites. Even the young Master-to-be was subdued that day. But when the old Chalice finally was laid to rest herself, her apprentice -- who had been her apprentice's apprentice, before the Season had taken its toll -- had been uncertain about using such a potent mixture, and finally used the usual mourning cup with its touch of rosemary and amaranth. She tried to keep her expression cool and focused on the cup she held when the young Master leapt up after the final rite.  
"Let's go hunting," the Master said. "There's good light left yet today, and they say the mountain goats have returned to the hills."  
The Chalice -- the new Chalice -- nodded gravely and turned to pour the last of the dregs over the stones. She would not cry, for the old Chalice was beyond insult, and the rites, after all, had been performed correctly. She would make up a cup for hunting, although the mourning cup that she held was completely and totally the wrong one.  
But when she rose from the ground and turned, the young Master had already taken his retinue and left, taking a shortcut through the fields, leaving a line through the oats that would remain the rest of the summer. 

***  
“Let’s call down an obelisk,” the young master said, leaping onto the bed by his Chalice and startling her from fitful sleep.  
She had been hard pressed to keep up with him the day before, as their ponies had plunged down the steep hillside. She did not have his talent for orogeny and had to rely on the pillars of basalt he created for footholds, just ahead of the hooves of his horse, and sometimes he did not remember she followed behind and would have let them sink back down but for her desperate grab to keep the basalt up just a little longer, enough time for her pony to catch the same foothold. In their wake, they had left a glittering ice slick down the side of the mountain. She was always exhausted after these jaunts, with barely enough energy to hold a chalice through dinner.  
He would always insist on throwing a party after such a day, a party that was attended less for the joy and more for the resolute drinking that happened among his followers. The Chalice was the only one who could temper the master’s torus, and it was not unusual for him to accidentally ice the surroundings when he got excited about one of his madcap ideas. As a result, she found that she had to combine such contradictory goals as tranquillity and watchfulness when mixing her cup. It was not an easy combination to hold, and not something her mentor had trained her in. The old Chalice had been deeply wise, of course, with two Seasons under her belt and many good years between. But that Chalice had been serving masters who, if anything, were over-cautious, and ready to drop all in favor of safety. Their imprint on the land had been to solidify the landlines against the risk of earthquake, to wrap the demesne in restful slumber, until they hardly needed their orogeny to quell tremors, the land being so willing to lie peacefully under their hand. Chalice supposed that they must have had their wild young days, but certainly the old Master had not come into his own until well into adulthood, and his father — the young master’s grandfather — had surely been able to balance the mistakes and over-reaches of youth.  
“Come on,” the young master now said, having confirmed that Chalice was awake, as she pushed herself up from the bed, groaning. He bounded to the window, and threw it open to show a sky roofed with high scudding clouds and drifting partially amongst them, a distant oblong that was a greenish-blue almost indistinguishable from the sky.  
“No one can control the obelisks,” Chalice yawned, turning to grab her tunic. It was embroidered with red and gold, with the shape of a wide-bowled cup picked out over the front and repeated in miniature on the sleeves. She tugged it on. She had already grown used to the young Master’s demands, which came so very suddenly and without warning, and kept a change of clothes ready to hand for just such an occasion.


End file.
